


Unexpected Item

by RobertSaysThis



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dark, Flash Fic, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 08:00:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18464803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobertSaysThis/pseuds/RobertSaysThis
Summary: The Cybermen happen wherever there are people. This is how they happen here.(A flash fic from years ago which eventually turned into a full fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14636684/chapters/39164668)





	Unexpected Item

Jen wasn’t alive when the machines had first arrived in the shops, and so she couldn’t think of what it was like without them. Her mother – back when Jen had a mother – had told her they’d all found them creepy when they first came out, but thought the children who grew up with them would accept them like so much else. They were boxes then, of course, ugly things with a scanner and a voice not quite like a woman’s. It was back before they’d needed a disguise.

For Jen’s mother was wrong about the children. As someone who had met so many old people who were stupid, she’d come to think that children were just small variations on a theme. Like whoever made the machines, she hadn’t imagined children running from their voices and bashing at their ports for holding cards, not stopping until an embarrassed shop assistant – people still worked in shops, then – came to hurry them away.

So there had been changes made. The scanner slid up into metal shaped like a torso, and people now bagged their shopping on the machine’s outstretched hand. When they got rid of the people from the shops they gave each machine a face, but they were never quite like a person’s.

The one thing they never changed was the voice. It remained the same throughout Jen’s childhood, on the edge of aggressive, on the edge of alive.

Once, Jen thought, she’d have worked in a shop, like her Mum and her Uncle once had. It wasn’t much, they’d told her, but it was still a job, and it was better than the jobs they had now. She imagined working in the shop on the corner as she counted out the rations for the week, as she fed her food voucher into the vacant mouth of a machine.

It beeped and buzzed, rejecting it. It repeated a phrase that meant nothing, and which meant Jen would go without food once more. Temperamental, these machines. As though they had a mind of their own.

Rejection of vouchers was more common these days, they said – the machines couldn’t get the parts, there was nothing that could be done. But Jen had heard of a group who built them here in Britain, who was looking for workers to start in just three days.

She knew what she was getting into. Some of the workers didn’t come back whole, of course, missing an arm or an eye. Yes, some didn’t come back at all. But the machines in the shop all needed parts, and the child in her body would soon need food.

“You will be like us”, said the machine in its stern, woman’s voice.

Jen thought it sounded almost like a dream.


End file.
